It's getting a bit cold, and the weather a bit erratic for canoeing. We tried to go out on Thursday but got rained off. But on Friday the sun shone! I wanted to have a go at fiddling around using different camera lenses, so we kidnapped my sister who is temporarily in the UK, and made her paddle.

See how we charged out into the river, leaving a wake behind us!A few clouds massing on the horizon, but it doesn't look very Novemberish.

We found a tidal creek and explored it. It's called Liphill Lake.I like this little blue house among the reedsMy sister, paddling as instructed.

I wasn't very successful with my long lens. It's hard to focus on flying things when you are in a wobbly canoe. But I did get this photo of some shelducks that we annoyed, flying off to somewhere with no canoes in it.

We think these were Whimbrels, although I wouldn't want to place a bet on them not being curlews. They were very well endowed in the probing beak department, I know that much. Possibly an autofocus lens would have revealed details about them, but then I'm not entirely sure that if I owned an expensive autofocus zoom lense I'd want to go canoeing with it, really. Practice may improve matters.

We got down the river far enough that we could see the Tamar Bridges - the suspension bridge is the road bridge, the main route into the south of Cornwall, built in 1961. The curvy bridge is the Royal Albert rail bridge built by Brunel in his top hat and opened in 1859. We canoed past it on the other side when we went from Saltash in August, but it was a lot busier then withlots of yachts and motorboats. We did see one yacht and a racing dinghy, but there were not many people out on the water on a Friday in November.

At around this point we noticed there was a lot of debris washed up on the shoreline. This was definitely the most revolting and notable item of debris. I think it's a yacht toilet. I am not sure if the rest of the yacht somehow exploded, leaving only this one bit floating, or if there was some nightmarish sequence of events that resulted in the toilet going overboard.I made them wait about while I took photos. They sighed at me.By this time I was getting cold so I demanded to paddle for a bit. We went around the corner and into the River Tavy. Most of this is tidal water, with an itty bitty river somewhere in the middle of it.And here is a shot of the rail bridge over the Tavy, just to prove that we did get all the way from the Tamar into the Tavy river. It had turned cold by now and a little choppy, so we were glad the wind was behind us as we headed back up the river to the slip at Weir Quay. We were a bit chilly by the time we got the canoe out of the water. If we go again this year, I'm definitely going to be wearing more socks.

15 feet - it was fine for three people (we were pleased to discover, not having tried taking out a passenger before), but I think squeezing in a hortator as well as the two paddlers and a photographer would have been pushing it a bit!